Dialogue re: election

You may be right. Your judgment about his ego is just that, though. Hard to verify, not to say gratuitous, I can forgive him for the jet-fighter. I buy his explanation that since it was going to happen anyway, it might as well be in his own state. Isn't this exactly the kind of realism you endorse?

I take your point about MLK running for office. But more interesting to me is the interplay between leaders and movements. Just because he is running for office doesn't mean BS is NOT leading a movement. How would he ever have got this far if there WEREN'T a movement?

Which brings me back to the question of demographics. The FACT is that BS's support varies inversely with age - including among African-Americans and women. I assume you do not consider Michelle Alexander to be seduced by "hot air." How about Keith Ellison? And why, would you say, Elizabeth Warren has not endorsed HC? If this be not a movement, but only an egotistical side-show, how do we account for these facts?,

It is possible - and entirely realistic - to conclude that the Reps are self-destructing and that the emerging political landscape is dominated by forces represented by the two Democrats. Time will tell, and no one can be sure. But the demographics, the best polls, and all the actual elections so far seem to support this conclusion.

Sanders and Revolution (from Facebook dialogue)

To compare Sanders to the Russian revolution is really a stretch. As Noam Chomsky says, he's not really even a socialist (in the classic sense) but a New Dealer. In other words, a gradualist. The center has moved before. It seems obvious to me that it is moving again. I see no reason to deem it "realistc" to insist that the center must stay where it has been in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton era. The facts I face are demographic and an indubitable shift to the left. This is the "political revoluion" of which S speaks. That's rhetoric. It is very far from the Ruaaian revolution.

Nor am I so worried about a "Seven Days in May" coup d'etat or Roman civil war. Like Stalin, I think we have succeeded in minimizing the danger of what he called "Bonapartism" by dividing the military and subverting the enormous bureaucracy by buying off the leadership with revolving doors.

Have a look at Sy Hersh's article in the London Review of Books, in which retired General Staffers openly admitted sharing intel with Assad, via our own allies (Germany, Israel, and Russia). Why is this comforting? It was Realpolitik over Regime-change exceptionalism. The point is that they did it by scrupulously following orders (to share intel with allies). While I am aware that this incident could argue also for the Frankenstein view of an out-of-control military, I think it shows its deeply bureaucratic nature.

As an enormous bureaucracy, the military is conservative and insitutionally stupid, hard to change, but susceptible to manipulation..It is also far from monolithic. As Stalin knew, Bonapartism could be avoided by Caesar's policy: divide et vinces. Personally, I am more afraid - long-term - of secret bureaucracies (CIA/NSA) running under their own clandestine steam through drugs and armament-sales.

Singlepayer health care, free education, and trust-busting to not threaten these spooks at all; The sluggish military bureaucracy even less. It is hardly a "revolution" in the Russian sense, and the horrors of Stalin are not analogous.

As for movements and organization, it seems to me that is exactly what BS is doing. He has said so from the beginning.

Sanders and Clinton

{What follows is a post in  Facebook thread, q.v.)

I can empathize with your view that Bernie could win only in another universe. I have a horrible feeling that you are right! On the other hand, in trying to exercise what little may be left of my critical-thinking faculty, I ask myself why I have this foreboding? Your argument is a strong answer. Yet I have to ask - with all respect - is it not based on feeling, as you say the Sanders-supporters' is? (Burned so many times - how could it ever be otherwise?").

This is not entirely feeling (we WERE burned the other times), but the argument rests on presuppositions regarding the Nature of the Universe in which we find ourselves. Basically, it is to say that our politics is always this way. You may be right, but I suggest that it is not merely wishful-thinking to call attention to the big demographic and economic changes. These are what our Marxist friends might call "material conditions". Depending on one's assessment of them, completely hard-headed realists can disagree on the conclusion to be drawn.

I will not accept the practical superiority of a Clinton candidacy on the basis of centrist analysis. This is also what I call "beltway consciousness" or Establishment consensus. I will have to be convinced that these conclusions are, in fact, realistic and not ideological. The fact that pundits repeat them is not enough for me.

I just read a Marxist analysis, criticizing Sanders from the left: essentially the Leninist objection to democratic socialism, that the latter is inseparable from the late-imperialist world order. Sander's utterances on the military and his own pork-barrel vote for military equipment support this criticism. [At least, he was honest enough to say that he hated it, knew it was going to pass in any case, and decided to bring home the bacon for VT!] Anyway, if he can't get elected as a Social Democrat, it is pretty certain that he would do not better as a Leninist!

So, if you have to rely on Clinton's bedrock commitment to women and children, in spite of all the warts, I guess it is fair for me to rely on Sander's bedrock commitment to economic justice and curbing the power of the oligarchy. In either case, as you point out, should they succeed Obama, Congress won't let either of them get much through. 

They will have to build a movement, and I am willing to hope that the time is right for such a movement to build. The youth mobilization is one evidence of that. So are new voters like my Somali friend who asks "Why can't we be like Germany?", where he lived for several years. It is also a fact of American history that sometimes these movements do succeed - against all odds - like the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King was, after all, a self-described dreamer.

What better position to build a movement than the Oval Office? Whether or not Sanders wins, I hope he will spend most of his time supporting organizing in congressional races. I think that is what he means by a "political revolution". I don't think Clinton would do that.

It seems to me that Clinton's career of "realistic" compromise has left her in a position of indebtedness to and dependence on the beneficiaries of the present system. That their spokespeople (mainstream media) tell me that she is inevitable is no surprise. Why should I believe them? Why should I not take seriously the many polls that show Sanders actually doing better? Even though these polls may be nearly worthless at this stage, they are at least more objective than my intuitions - or anyone else's - about what is realistic. I would like to see some similar objectivity in support of Clinton.